Note: Super sorry about the seriously shaky footage above. Next time I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen.

Yesterday, I spent about 12 hours making what I thought would take “a couple hours” — the Flow Receiver module. In the video above, you can see me demoing the system. Everything is up and running and working seemingly well. This means it’s time to start creating “art.”

I designed the UI for this thing to be as simple as I could make it while also accounting for the fact that I’d be using it on a touch-enabled display. It only has three different “views” which you can see below.

Everything for Flow Receiver is built using Adobe AIR. It communicates with Community Core Vision using CCV’s built-in UDP->TCP bridge which sends out TUIO data associated with the tracked blobs.

Flow Receiver intercepts this TUIO data and displays the incoming data in the right-side panel. I’ll also use this software to interface with the Flow Storage back-end module for creating projects and recording the TUIO data to those projects.

When in “recording mode”, Flow Receiver buffers the incoming TUIO points until its internal “cache” is full, then sends that info via HTTP POST request to Flow Storage which dumps it into a MySQL database. I’m also storing a timestamp (to the millisecond) with each TUIO point collected so that I can later determine velocity data between “frames” as needed.

When it’s time to export a project’s data, I’ll use Flow Receiver to export the data as either an XML or CSV text file.

Not much else to it than that; it’s a super-simple application.

On a side note, I’m pretty amazed at what we can do with technology these days, the number of options from which we have to choose, and the speed at which we can produce this stuff. I’ve somehow managed to create a fully-functioning toolset in a total of about 20 man-hours, cobbled together from open source libraries, applications, and various other technologies — all at pretty much zero cost (aside from the time put in).